In the box making industry, after the corrugated boards are made such as by a corrugating machine, they go to a finishing machine where they are conveyed to a printing station where an inked printing roller prints the desired indicia on each board. The indicia can be for example the name or trademark of the goods to be contained in the box and other useful information. The boards are then conveyed to another station where the board is cut and creased to later facilitate forming the blanks into boxes or other corrugated products. The blanks may also be folded and glued to form flattened boxes. The boards are then typically discharged into a stacker and strapped for shipment to the point of use.
Although finishing machines may be rated to run at ten thousand (10,000) boxes an hour, in reality they run at far less, for example, less than forty percent of their capacity or less than four thousand (4,000) boxes per hour. Various factors combine to result in this low efficiency. They often include the lack of proper supplies at the machine such as printing ink, printing plates, cutting dies, die bolts, plate mounting bands, tools, ink viscosity measuring devices, ink chemistry materials, etc. which must be applied or used in each job. In some cases the supplies, even if correct, are not brought to the machine in time. The result is that productivity is substantially reduced and the cost of manufacture is of course substantially increased. Moreover, many present box plants do not have any structured system for notifying a supervisor during a production run that the run is behind or will fall behind schedule. Even though training courses have been given to operators of the finishing machines to teach them the requirements for efficient operation, the reality is that many machines still run well below their capabilities.